Weekly PPC Roundup – Be My Valentine Edition

Love is in the air as we gear up for Valentine’s Day, or at least in the PPC world!

This week, we partnered up with Trada to pour our hearts into a fantastic webinar, All You Need is PPC Love. (In case you missed it, the slides and transcript are now available!). The webinar should help you on your way to a great relationship with your PPC campaigns.

Let’s have a look at some other great search marketing resources from the Web this week:

Some spend the time near Valentine’s Day lamenting on their inability to find a good date, or making the same mistakes over and over with bad dates from the past. Well, it’s no different in the PPC world. Are you making these same 3 PPC mistakes over and over? Read the article from the Wordstream blog to find out.

And if you are getting caught in the same problems with your PPC campaigns, it sounds like it’s probably time to move on, like Craig Silverstein, Google’s first hired employee, who has broken up with Google after 14 years together. While he leaves on a positive note to begin a new career journey at Khan Academy, surely his goodbye email did not come easily. As they say, “breaking up is hard to do”.

And why would anyone want to break up with Google? Well, some are still in a bind over the privacy policy changes. But change can be hard to digest. Just look at the outrage that ensues every time Facebook changes! Thankfully, change can also be good, and Peter Wise of Search Engine Journal certainly thinks so with his article “The New Google Analytics Fuels and On-Site Revolution”. In this post, he takes readers through the new Google Analytics interface, showcasing the benefits and showing how he’s changed his tune since his initial resistance to the update.

Folks have turned to online dating to help link up their social lives in real life. Have you been struggling with linking strategies in your PPC campaign? Justilien Gaspard from Search Engine Watch has a technique that you may not have tried yet – Using Government Data for Link Development. He gives readers sources of publicly available information to glean for linking strategy building, and offers tips for what types of information to use to approach different types of organizations. You never know where your next big lead might come from!

For your Valentine’s Day date, who picks up the tab? Would you get upset if your date didn’t offer to pay? Are you a sugar daddy/momma? Well, if the world is on a date with Facebook and Google, some people are sitting at the dinner table staring at the check waiting for these Internet giants to get out their wallets, according to this article by Nick Bilton in the New York Times blog, Bits, entitled “Disruptions: Facebook Users Ask, ‘Where’s Our Cut?‘”. Nick writes, “So why am I asking for money from Facebook and not Google? Although there have been hundreds of technology-related I.P.O.’s over the last decade, Facebook is the first real social-media public offering, where the content on the site is entirely created by its users.” He goes on to quote an economics professor at Tufts University who says “The proprietor of a cafe doesn’t use personal information about me and my friends to make money”. Interesting stuff. Where do you stand on this issue?

Maybe you’ve turned to online dating to find a partner. If so, you’ll need to craft a profile that reflects your information in a compelling way, with just the right picture. Not too far off from a great infographic, right? (Okay this analogy was a bit of a reach…) Well Danika Atkins is here to save the day…for infographics, that is. You’re on your own for your dating profile! In Danika’s article “Creating Kickass Infographics on a Budget” on the Outspoken Media blog, she covers every step of the infographic process, from finding the information to base it on to actually creating the visual design.

And speaking of creating irresistible graphics for your business…hopefully you haven’t forgotten to create irresistible content on social media sites as well It may not actually be your choice, according to a study released by the University of Chicago’s Booth Business School that claims that it is actually more difficult for people to resist the pull of social media than it is to resist sex, sleep, cigarettes or alcohol. Supposedly because of social media’s low perceived amount of risk, it makes it all the easier to check on that Facebook status, retweet, pin, update, and share. It looks like when it comes to our favorite social media sites, resistance very well may be futile.

Well, that’s all for this week’s PPC update. Please feel free to leave us a comment here or catch up with us on twitter. Thanks for reading and have a great weekend!